“One hundred and sixty-one years ago today, a light of dark genius was extinguished forever under bizarre circumstances that remain unclear to this day. At approximately 5:00 AM on Sunday, 7 October 1849, at the end of several days of delirium, Edgar Allan Poe regained complete consciousness only long enough to speak his last words […]

Tonight’s Dark Sentiment is a story of rivalry, violence, voyeurism, and post coital carnage. It began on the night of the first day of September this year when I was entering my porch and a flurry of movement to my left caused me to pause and investigate. The movement was two male “Cross Orb Weaver” […]

Title notwithstanding, today we started testing the Little Chief smoker by Smokehouse Products of Hood River, Oregon. For this first trial run, we’re doing a short flavour smoke on marinated pork chops and beef patties. Taste testing reports and a product review in a week or two as comprehensive testing proceeds.

You can keep your bit coin mining. It’s a well known fact that nickel mining is an important component of the Canadian economy. Less well known is that the one in Sudbury, Ontario, is the biggest we’ve ever found. This is Canada Day up here in the Great White North, on which all and sundry […]

As if the news hasn’t been serving up enough provocation for eyebrow raising, brow furrowing, and lip pursing to last us up to Yule, this Summer Solstice found us waking up to news out of Europe proclaiming CO2 shortage could leave beer drinkers flat — Supply in Europe runs thin just as World Cup boosts […]

I have just come out the other end, as it were, of a week of battle with an intestinal infection of surpassing vileness. Among other things, it spawned this. Critic’s Notes on Maestro Whynacht’s Symphony, “A Week in Thirty-six Movements” I attended the first performance of Maestro Whynacht’s daunting new symphony, “A Week in Thirty-six […]

The production of cheese predates recorded history. It originated through the transportation of milk in bladders made of ruminants’ stomachs due to their inherent supply of rennet. There is no conclusive evidence indicating where cheese-making originated. However, it may have originated either in Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, or the Sahara. Cheese-making was known […]

Our title today paraphrases G. K. Chesterton’s observation that, “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” The poem was inspired by a combination of current meteorological realities here in Nova Scotia, and some reading I’ve been doing on daily life of British and Commonwealth soldiers in […]

“As to Human kind, Winter will bring challenges at the end of which the result will lie on a spectrum ranging from the greatest of joys to the gravest of sorrows, and in this it stands as no different from any other aspect of life but for bearing a greater degree of urgency and inexorable […]

Culturally, the hospitality aspects of festivities prevailing at this time of year exist in a maelstrom of ill considered and contradictory drives. Year after year, many will attempt to answer seasonal motivations to visit people who sometimes live at a great remove and may be reached at no small peril to life and limb, even […]